Monthly Archives: April 2009

“One of the rea­sons Thai­land has failed to flour­ish as once pre­dict­ed is that its growth was built on weak­er foun­da­tions than sup­posed.” Extract from David Pilling in the Finan­cial Times (sub­scrip­tion)

But is there such a thing as ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ foun­da­tions for macro­eco­nom­ic growth?

Sandy Szwarc has pub­lished a fas­ci­nat­ing dis­sec­tion of the pan­ic over Mex­i­can ‘swine’ flu. She points out that if you check nation­al health data, you’ll find that influen­za kills about the same num­ber of peo­ple in pan­dem­ic and in non-pan­dem­ic years.

“In fact, most of us have lived through a flu pan­dem­ic and nev­er even real­ized it. The Hong Kong flu pan­dem­ic in 1968–69, for exam­ple, killed an esti­mat­ed 33,800 Amer­i­cans. That sounds like a lot, but it’s about the same num­ber of Amer­i­cans who die from the flu in a typ­i­cal year.” Extract fromJunk­food Sci­ence

This news makes the delay in agree­ment between Aus­tralia and Chi­na on an FTA look even more pecu­liar.

” Chi­na and Peru on Tues­day signed a free trade agree­ment, state media here said, as Bei­jing con­tin­ues to seek new mar­kets and reserves of raw mate­ri­als to fuel its econ­o­my… Chi­na has become min­er­al-rich Peru’s sec­ond largest trad­ing part­ner after the Unit­ed States. Peru is a major pro­duc­er of lead, zinc, cop­per, tin and gold.” Extract fromAFP (Yahoo)

Why is Aus­tralia slip­ping down the queue? On my cal­cu­la­tion, based on the WTOdata­base of region­al trade agree­ments, this is the eleventhFTA that Chi­na has signed since it agreed, in 2004, to start nego­ti­a­tions with us. Fin­ish­ing ahead of us: ASEAN (twice), New Zealand, Pak­istan, a group of South Asian economies and now Peru (as well as Hong Kong and Macao that are spe­cial cas­es).

Our free-trade agree­ment with Chi­na was always going to be dif­fi­cult to pull off.

A Swedish Court’s con­vic­tion of the prin­ci­pals in Pirate Bay, a bit-tor­rent site that facil­i­tat­ed shar­ing of copy­right mate­r­i­al may be only the first step in a sig­nif­i­cant case on dig­i­tal copy­right abuse.

The deci­sion will like­ly have no impact on the shar­ing of copy­right mate­r­i­al. There are hun­dreds of tor­rent aggre­ga­tors and prob­a­bly thou­sands of dif­fer­ent ways to dis­guise the shar­ing of dig­i­tal files. The Pirate Bay case is inter­est­ing main­ly for its legal find­ings that broad­en the respon­si­bil­i­ty of what are, in effect, search engines for the ille­gal actions of their users.

But the deci­sion could be seri­ous­ly taint­ed by what looks like bias on the part of the Judge and the inves­ti­gat­ing police.

Mean­while in Gene­va… the WTO del­e­ga­tions have been debat­ing whether the Secretariat’s sec­ond report on pro­tec­tion­ist mea­sures (issued a month ago) showed ‘sig­nif­i­cant slip­page’ in Mem­ber gov­ern­ments’ com­mit­ment to hold the line, or not.

The U.S. ambas­sador dis­agreed with the propo­si­tion that Mem­ber gov­ern­ments had begun to default on their promis­es.

“We under­stand the dan­ger of an incre­men­tal build-up of restric­tions but do not think that the facts bear out the sug­ges­tion in the intro­duc­tion of the report that ‘there has been sig­nif­i­cant slip­page’ since the begin­ning of the year,” said Peter All­geier, the US ambas­sador to the WTO, adding that he thought the phrase ‘some slip­page’ was more appro­pri­ate.

While the Doha Round remains out of reach they have noth­ing bet­ter to do than to argue this sort of stuff. The Hong Kong del­e­ga­tion (pos­si­bly as a proxy for you-know-who) has been attempt­ing to get Mem­bers’ agree­ment to a tem­po­rary, ‘bind­ing’ stand­still dec­la­ra­tion on top of their reg­u­lar WTO oblig­a­tions. A WTO ver­sion of the G20 pledge.

Last I heard that idea had also fall­en foul of the del­e­ga­tions’ quib­bling over terms.

Peter Gallagher

Peter Gallagher is student of piano and photography. He was formerly a senior trade official of the Australian government. For some years after leaving government, he consulted to international organizations, governments and business groups on trade and public policy.

He teaches graduate classes at the University of Adelaide on trade research methods and the role of firms in trade and growth and tweets trade (and other) stuff from @pwgallagher